Well that letter was so full of corporate BS it was making my PC steam. And the aroma! At least the flowers will grow.
It's ridiculous that someone in his position wouldn't know about bundling practices, it was probably his idea. He apologises that it happened, he says he'll look into it, but he doesn't actually bother admitting that it was their own idea and they did it to make money. A sales and marketing exercise like the release of a new console is probably almost as important as christmas to these guys. Just like anything that makes customers (aka walking wallets full of cash to take) to line up outside the shop has got to get some special attention at the highest level.
It's purely a PR exercise. They're not really sorry, and if they thought they could get away with it, they would. Heck, from the attitide of that letter, if they thought they could get a good revenue stream from stealing old ladies handbags, they would. Especially if all they have to do afterwards is write a "sorry, don't know what happened to your handbag, maybe it went missing, I don't believe in stealing handbags so I will look into it" letter.
What is AMD doing in the future? It's all well and good that intel is still playing catch up, but it's much more important to know what the technology leader is doing. Quad core CPU's next year, I understand, from AMD. Intel? Who knows.
If I were the CEO of a company that produces operating systems with an intent to make profit, when faced with the decision:
Making the OS infinitely more extensible at the risk of severe security vulnerability with the benefit of capturing over 90% market share and monopolising it (and only releasing patches if someone finds out about or exploits a particular vulnerability)...
OR
Make the OS secure but less functional. Play nice with competing companies by not entering their markets. Releasing OS versions less often, even though it hurts profits, to make sure that one OS is completely patched before even starting on the next one...
Actually, sometimes I think it would be very cool to get an email, and with a very short transition time (one, maybe two contextually guided clicks), see that the sender is online and get an opportunity to IM right away. And have that message context passed along (Like, pass on the email subject line with the IM). A vergance between email and IM is probably going to be a killer in the future, so long as someone does it right.
ICQ and more recently Yahoo! messengers got it right, because you can send a message to someone, online or offline, and be reasonably confident they'll get it. The messages just queue up until you log on and you get a bunch of messages right away. Sometimes it seems easier to leave a message to an offline buddy through IM than it is to open an email client and type one out and assign an email address and send it. A bit of streamlining with offline IM... It could be very good.
It won't work. Microsoft will invent and patent envelopes. Open source paper sleeves won't compete because people will always complain about getting the right kind of glue to hold the sleeve together so your schedule doesn't fall out. Open source sleeve advocates will try to get Microsoft sued for illegal bundling of adhesive on their MS-Envelope.
It's a very odd thing to bring up Warhol at a time like this.
Warhol was *not* trying to sell Campbells Soup when he made that famous painting. Quite the opposite, where once artists painted women and men and scenes of the land - all things that reflect their own surroundings, Warhol did just the same thing. Only, by painting a branded can of soup, he really said, "Hey, look how things have changed now. If I were born 100 years ago this would be a person or a landscape. Now it is a brand or a product."
Frankly I think we're meant to hate the soup.
On Warhols behalf, I'd like to ask modders and gamers and users of IT everywhere to rage against this machine. Skip commercials on playback. Change radio stations when an advert comes on. Use Adblock. Block popups. Use spam filters. Most of the people here already do.
Now I'm asking a little more. Mod games, strip out the ads. Download the mods. Play the games without the ads.
We had a society once where advertising budgets did not eclipse R&D budgets by a factor of 2-3 times (at least). We can have that society again. Fight the advertising mechanisms.
Which makes me think, such an activity by a major provider like this would cause Google to light up all that dark fibre and run their own chunk of internet. Heck, they could even do their own bit of routing, so if you use Google search and see Google ads, your websites load much faster than if you use Yahoo!.
Now that corporations are running the internet, something like this is bound to happen, and it's a bad bad thing.
Say Microsoft pallys up to the ISPs and throws some cash and free Windows Vista licenses at them in exchange for making sites like, say, Linux.org run at the total speed of maybe 56kbits/sec for all the people using those ethically questionable ISPs. Throw in some bad performance for a few more sites, too, like OSDN and SourceForge. Linux suddenly isn't so appealing when you can't connect for support or download ISO's as easily as you used to.
I think the article was pointing a finger reasonably squarely at the very big review sites that post high scores for the very big game properties.
Enter The Matrix - the game that went along inbetween the second and third movies for instance. If anybody played it could tell you it was a very average game, came out in the 9-10 spots from some big name reviewers, check it out at metacritic. It had initially a very high rating that dropped sharply as more "indy" game review sites reviewed it more realistically and bagged it for what it was.
Aggregators are generally a better guide because of course the more reviews you have, the higher the proportion of non-bribed reviews, so the lower the scores.
We live in an era where publishing houses pay developers (in some cases) on the basis of how well the game scores in reviews - and therefore, since the review sites are more and more often demonstrating they're up for sale, review scores are being purchased and journalistic integrity went away a long time ago.
Two rubber bands, one at either end, or even better, velcro cable ties. I've done the same thing with the CAT-5e that the guys use when the come over for LAN games, since they all sit very close to the switch.
Even better, put it all in a box with a hole in it so the cables can run out and one power cable can run in. Label the end of each cable so you know which is which (presumably he already does this because sometimes it is hard to tell one power pack from the other at a glance). This is using the same principle as a rack in a server room, just a way of encapsulating and compartmentalising the devices and cables.
A simulated reputation economy is just a facet of the existing monetary economy. Image economy has been going on since the first invention of the advertisement. Image is everything and we have never seen so much spin as we do today.
I read an interesting comment the other day - have you ever seen a review site that gives reviews lower than 6 out of 10? Not much of a scale if the mean is 7.5 and data never appears below that point!
I thought the first three shows were great! I just saw the 7th episode and I was cradling my head in agony. Maybe the alien signal is real and that is what is making the show suddenly... not good.
I read the Forbes article and it was terrible! The author complains about how the Xbox 360 was much worse than the Atari 2600. He even mentions that the 2600 was the best console ever - well.. that's probably the NES, given that the progeny of the NES are still being played today, and people are all talking about the Revolution. Can't see anyone mentioning a brand new Atari console coming any time soon.
The author mentions that the Atari joystick was better because it had one axis and one button, and the Apple mouse is much easier to use because it only has one button. While technically you could say he was speaking the truth, you can't do a lot with only one mouse button (take away a Mac users funky bonus keys on his keyboard then ask him to do something useful with his mouse!) and you can't have intellectually satisfying games with only one joystick button.
He goes on about how much fun the Atari games were and how he doesn't get any of the same joy from playing 360 games. Well frankly, the article is just misguided. You can't bag the Xbox 360 on the premise it didn't make you 12 years old again, so you can experience all the wonder of discovering computer games once more. But that's just what the author is really doing.
The Xbox 360 is a great console (despite heat issues, something the PS3 will suffer from as well). It won't make me a kid again. But the games will still be fun to play, and on a face value, I would always choose an Xbox 360 game over Atari. As the consoles have become more sophisticated, people's tastes have followed. Ask anybody you know who's into retro gaming if they've spent an all nighter playing space invaders. Ask any contemporary gamer if, lately, he's stayed up all night playing, say, Civ 4 or any other very addictive new game. I think I know who'll be saying yes.
Please, don't be so amateurish, the files are all still there. I will be downloading $sys$Madonna and $sys$Eminem songs for years to come. For some reason, however, as soon as I finish downloading them I can't see them in explorer anymore!
You've provided your own answer there, but you are quite wrong about it being a microsoft cost cutting exercise (they're already deliberately loss leading on the console).
You mentioned that PC's can be high performance and relatively quiet. What then is the difference between the console and the PC? The size of the device, of course!
The chassis of a cooled and quieted PC is generally quite large, this provides a lot of space for air to move around and heat to transfer around the air cooled components. You can get the same cooling in a smaller space, but you need to increase the airflow throughput to do so - faster, noisier fans. In a smaller form factor, you also need to reduce the size of your fans - so to push the same air they need to run even faster - more noise.
So.... it's okay for you to change the way you play games by buying a new game system... a change you want.
But it's not okay for you to live with the new constraint that the latest technology needs better cooling than the technology from 4 years ago.
You're welcome to avoid change any time you like. You can pick up NES's for quite cheap on Ebay, I understand.
Personally I'm looking forward to all the benefits of the next era of technology, even if I might have to adjust the way I arrange my equipment a little.
It's not substandard. It is exactly standard. The Xbox 360 pumps out as much heat as you would expect from any system running 3 x 3.2GHz processors (and GPU). This IS a PC, that by your very definition, is a bunch of very advanced, very hot chips in a box.
You want the heat characteristics of an NES? You also get the graphics and performance of an NES.
You want the performance and graphics of a state of the art PC gaming rig? You get the heat characteristics of a state of the art PC gaming rig.
You put a box with the heat characteristics of a PC gaming rig in a small cabinet? You get overheating problems.
Instead of just whining about how many rights and priveleges you deserve because you have $400 to spend on a device, try to understand the technologies and properties of these systems before you start spouting on about what you've decided is acceptable and what isn't.
How much cooling do you think a desktop PC with 3 x 3.2GHz PPC processors would need?
Why then would you expect the Xbox 360, in a smaller form factor, to need less?
I haven't read the manual for the Xbox 360, but I would go out on a limb and suggest that somewhere they would list a range of safe operating temperatures for the units environment. I would also suggest that the majority of people complaining of problems have not read/disregarded that part of the manual, and are running the systems in environments that are far beyond the manufacturers recommended parameters.
The PS3 is going to have exactly the same problems - a lot of high power processors in a small box all trying to shed heat as best they can. If you want to have a console that competes with the PC for gaming, you need to handle the same problems the PC has as well. Just because you put it in a small box and call it a console, doesn't mean the nature of the device inside will change.
Microsoft are being remarkably responsible about the problems that people are experiencing, by not only acknowledging there are problems, but offering solutions.
Ugh. I'm a windows gamer (I realise I am kissing my karma goodbye here) but I absolutely abhor rebooting my system at all, especially just to play a game for five minutes.
It's the same reason I don't use Linux. I would like to use Linux. I know Linux isn't a beginner system and there's a lot of work involved in making it behave smoothly and completely on a system, I'm not afraid of that. I'm an I/T worker (this supports my gaming habit). But I don't use it because I need to play games, lots of games, and I don't want to pay for Cedega on the off chance that the games I want to play will be compatible with it. This leaves me with dual booting as the only viable option. That would mean an awful lot of restarts because I have a short attention span. And why restart when Windows happens to run all the apps I want as well as the games?
It's even worse when you consider that there's no guarantee, as the topic informs us, that any binary you get has no guarantee of working right away like it does in Windows. I won't recommend Linux to anybody I know until I am 100% certain they will never need to compile anything, they will never need to know what a dependency is, and they will never need to use a text editor.
Who cares? All the copyright cartel needs to do is donate a bunch of CD's to the ISPs, then they can just go in and take whatever they want! I heard Sony is recalling a whole bunch of them (possibly just for this purpose?)
Running things with restricted privelege isn't so hard (actually I just moved into the DBA group here and they do it all the time). You just need to do all the obvious things like make sure the service account has all the particular rights it needs. Delegation is actually quite good under Windows, very granular, so if you're willing to put in the effort it can be done. Especially with MS products, they tend to be quite good, although the MSN example is an unusual one. I certainly wouldn't be recommending MSN messenger to anybody though, probably even less than I would recommend MSIE to anyone (which I wouldn't).
Something else nobody has mentioned here is that Microsoft isn't buying all of these components, at least in the long run. They've licensed the technology for a lot of the parts (unlike the XBox where they practically bought everything off the rack). They can pretty much (license allowing) get anyone they like to make the parts at the cheapest prices, and they're free to shop around.
Initial runs for things like silicon and so on have really poor yields, this drives costs up quite a lot, but you could probably expect a pretty big drop in cost of production as economies of scale ramp up. Eventually MS will probably be breaking even on the hardware, or, more likely, they'll keep loss leading and drop the price through the floor. In a years time, which will you buy, a $200 Xbox 360 or a $600+ PS3 (with added r00tkit goodness)?
Unix style application isolation is being implemented properly in Vista. Of course, this vulnerability won't affect anyone running IE from a non-priveleged user account anyway, which is the case in many corporate environments, and is a recommended best practice from Microsoft (even if it is not the default under the current versions of Windows on the market).
On the home front many end users who are not tech-savvy enough to run Linux and not wealthy enough to pay Mac-tax will be running Windows as administrators for usability purposes.
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Well that letter was so full of corporate BS it was making my PC steam. And the aroma! At least the flowers will grow.
It's ridiculous that someone in his position wouldn't know about bundling practices, it was probably his idea. He apologises that it happened, he says he'll look into it, but he doesn't actually bother admitting that it was their own idea and they did it to make money. A sales and marketing exercise like the release of a new console is probably almost as important as christmas to these guys. Just like anything that makes customers (aka walking wallets full of cash to take) to line up outside the shop has got to get some special attention at the highest level.
It's purely a PR exercise. They're not really sorry, and if they thought they could get away with it, they would. Heck, from the attitide of that letter, if they thought they could get a good revenue stream from stealing old ladies handbags, they would. Especially if all they have to do afterwards is write a "sorry, don't know what happened to your handbag, maybe it went missing, I don't believe in stealing handbags so I will look into it" letter.
It'll be fine so long as researching Japanese "scientists" don't harpoon it. For science.
What is AMD doing in the future? It's all well and good that intel is still playing catch up, but it's much more important to know what the technology leader is doing. Quad core CPU's next year, I understand, from AMD. Intel? Who knows.
If I were the CEO of a company that produces operating systems with an intent to make profit, when faced with the decision:
Making the OS infinitely more extensible at the risk of severe security vulnerability with the benefit of capturing over 90% market share and monopolising it (and only releasing patches if someone finds out about or exploits a particular vulnerability)...
OR
Make the OS secure but less functional. Play nice with competing companies by not entering their markets. Releasing OS versions less often, even though it hurts profits, to make sure that one OS is completely patched before even starting on the next one...
I would pick the former.
Actually, sometimes I think it would be very cool to get an email, and with a very short transition time (one, maybe two contextually guided clicks), see that the sender is online and get an opportunity to IM right away. And have that message context passed along (Like, pass on the email subject line with the IM). A vergance between email and IM is probably going to be a killer in the future, so long as someone does it right.
ICQ and more recently Yahoo! messengers got it right, because you can send a message to someone, online or offline, and be reasonably confident they'll get it. The messages just queue up until you log on and you get a bunch of messages right away. Sometimes it seems easier to leave a message to an offline buddy through IM than it is to open an email client and type one out and assign an email address and send it. A bit of streamlining with offline IM... It could be very good.
It won't work. Microsoft will invent and patent envelopes. Open source paper sleeves won't compete because people will always complain about getting the right kind of glue to hold the sleeve together so your schedule doesn't fall out. Open source sleeve advocates will try to get Microsoft sued for illegal bundling of adhesive on their MS-Envelope.
It's a very odd thing to bring up Warhol at a time like this.
Warhol was *not* trying to sell Campbells Soup when he made that famous painting. Quite the opposite, where once artists painted women and men and scenes of the land - all things that reflect their own surroundings, Warhol did just the same thing. Only, by painting a branded can of soup, he really said, "Hey, look how things have changed now. If I were born 100 years ago this would be a person or a landscape. Now it is a brand or a product."
Frankly I think we're meant to hate the soup.
On Warhols behalf, I'd like to ask modders and gamers and users of IT everywhere to rage against this machine. Skip commercials on playback. Change radio stations when an advert comes on. Use Adblock. Block popups. Use spam filters. Most of the people here already do.
Now I'm asking a little more. Mod games, strip out the ads. Download the mods. Play the games without the ads.
We had a society once where advertising budgets did not eclipse R&D budgets by a factor of 2-3 times (at least). We can have that society again. Fight the advertising mechanisms.
Which makes me think, such an activity by a major provider like this would cause Google to light up all that dark fibre and run their own chunk of internet. Heck, they could even do their own bit of routing, so if you use Google search and see Google ads, your websites load much faster than if you use Yahoo!.
Now that corporations are running the internet, something like this is bound to happen, and it's a bad bad thing.
Say Microsoft pallys up to the ISPs and throws some cash and free Windows Vista licenses at them in exchange for making sites like, say, Linux.org run at the total speed of maybe 56kbits/sec for all the people using those ethically questionable ISPs. Throw in some bad performance for a few more sites, too, like OSDN and SourceForge. Linux suddenly isn't so appealing when you can't connect for support or download ISO's as easily as you used to.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
I think the article was pointing a finger reasonably squarely at the very big review sites that post high scores for the very big game properties.
Enter The Matrix - the game that went along inbetween the second and third movies for instance. If anybody played it could tell you it was a very average game, came out in the 9-10 spots from some big name reviewers, check it out at metacritic. It had initially a very high rating that dropped sharply as more "indy" game review sites reviewed it more realistically and bagged it for what it was.
Aggregators are generally a better guide because of course the more reviews you have, the higher the proportion of non-bribed reviews, so the lower the scores.
We live in an era where publishing houses pay developers (in some cases) on the basis of how well the game scores in reviews - and therefore, since the review sites are more and more often demonstrating they're up for sale, review scores are being purchased and journalistic integrity went away a long time ago.
Two rubber bands, one at either end, or even better, velcro cable ties. I've done the same thing with the CAT-5e that the guys use when the come over for LAN games, since they all sit very close to the switch.
Even better, put it all in a box with a hole in it so the cables can run out and one power cable can run in. Label the end of each cable so you know which is which (presumably he already does this because sometimes it is hard to tell one power pack from the other at a glance). This is using the same principle as a rack in a server room, just a way of encapsulating and compartmentalising the devices and cables.
Does it matter? They benchmarked it against AMD systems running 400MHz DDR memory, and the AMD systems perform better.
Furthermore, faster RAM = more expensive RAM... why pay more money, when I could pay less, buy AMD, and get better performance than Intel?
A simulated reputation economy is just a facet of the existing monetary economy. Image economy has been going on since the first invention of the advertisement. Image is everything and we have never seen so much spin as we do today.
I read an interesting comment the other day - have you ever seen a review site that gives reviews lower than 6 out of 10? Not much of a scale if the mean is 7.5 and data never appears below that point!
I thought the first three shows were great! I just saw the 7th episode and I was cradling my head in agony. Maybe the alien signal is real and that is what is making the show suddenly... not good.
The 300GB disks have a 20Mbit write speed. That is an *awful* lot of time to copy data onto disk. It's not always the size that counts!
Want to back up 1.6TB with a 20Mbit pipe? That'll take roughly 7.7 days according to my calculations.
This technology is not suited for enterprise backups.
I read the Forbes article and it was terrible! The author complains about how the Xbox 360 was much worse than the Atari 2600. He even mentions that the 2600 was the best console ever - well.. that's probably the NES, given that the progeny of the NES are still being played today, and people are all talking about the Revolution. Can't see anyone mentioning a brand new Atari console coming any time soon.
The author mentions that the Atari joystick was better because it had one axis and one button, and the Apple mouse is much easier to use because it only has one button. While technically you could say he was speaking the truth, you can't do a lot with only one mouse button (take away a Mac users funky bonus keys on his keyboard then ask him to do something useful with his mouse!) and you can't have intellectually satisfying games with only one joystick button.
He goes on about how much fun the Atari games were and how he doesn't get any of the same joy from playing 360 games. Well frankly, the article is just misguided. You can't bag the Xbox 360 on the premise it didn't make you 12 years old again, so you can experience all the wonder of discovering computer games once more. But that's just what the author is really doing.
The Xbox 360 is a great console (despite heat issues, something the PS3 will suffer from as well). It won't make me a kid again. But the games will still be fun to play, and on a face value, I would always choose an Xbox 360 game over Atari. As the consoles have become more sophisticated, people's tastes have followed. Ask anybody you know who's into retro gaming if they've spent an all nighter playing space invaders. Ask any contemporary gamer if, lately, he's stayed up all night playing, say, Civ 4 or any other very addictive new game. I think I know who'll be saying yes.
Please, don't be so amateurish, the files are all still there. I will be downloading $sys$Madonna and $sys$Eminem songs for years to come. For some reason, however, as soon as I finish downloading them I can't see them in explorer anymore!
You've provided your own answer there, but you are quite wrong about it being a microsoft cost cutting exercise (they're already deliberately loss leading on the console).
You mentioned that PC's can be high performance and relatively quiet.
What then is the difference between the console and the PC? The size of the device, of course!
The chassis of a cooled and quieted PC is generally quite large, this provides a lot of space for air to move around and heat to transfer around the air cooled components. You can get the same cooling in a smaller space, but you need to increase the airflow throughput to do so - faster, noisier fans. In a smaller form factor, you also need to reduce the size of your fans - so to push the same air they need to run even faster - more noise.
So.... it's okay for you to change the way you play games by buying a new game system... a change you want.
But it's not okay for you to live with the new constraint that the latest technology needs better cooling than the technology from 4 years ago.
You're welcome to avoid change any time you like. You can pick up NES's for quite cheap on Ebay, I understand.
Personally I'm looking forward to all the benefits of the next era of technology, even if I might have to adjust the way I arrange my equipment a little.
Have fun with Super Mario Bros!
It's not substandard. It is exactly standard. The Xbox 360 pumps out as much heat as you would expect from any system running 3 x 3.2GHz processors (and GPU). This IS a PC, that by your very definition, is a bunch of very advanced, very hot chips in a box.
You want the heat characteristics of an NES? You also get the graphics and performance of an NES.
You want the performance and graphics of a state of the art PC gaming rig? You get the heat characteristics of a state of the art PC gaming rig.
You put a box with the heat characteristics of a PC gaming rig in a small cabinet? You get overheating problems.
Instead of just whining about how many rights and priveleges you deserve because you have $400 to spend on a device, try to understand the technologies and properties of these systems before you start spouting on about what you've decided is acceptable and what isn't.
How much cooling do you think a desktop PC with 3 x 3.2GHz PPC processors would need?
Why then would you expect the Xbox 360, in a smaller form factor, to need less?
I haven't read the manual for the Xbox 360, but I would go out on a limb and suggest that somewhere they would list a range of safe operating temperatures for the units environment. I would also suggest that the majority of people complaining of problems have not read/disregarded that part of the manual, and are running the systems in environments that are far beyond the manufacturers recommended parameters.
The PS3 is going to have exactly the same problems - a lot of high power processors in a small box all trying to shed heat as best they can. If you want to have a console that competes with the PC for gaming, you need to handle the same problems the PC has as well. Just because you put it in a small box and call it a console, doesn't mean the nature of the device inside will change.
Microsoft are being remarkably responsible about the problems that people are experiencing, by not only acknowledging there are problems, but offering solutions.
Ugh. I'm a windows gamer (I realise I am kissing my karma goodbye here) but I absolutely abhor rebooting my system at all, especially just to play a game for five minutes.
It's the same reason I don't use Linux. I would like to use Linux. I know Linux isn't a beginner system and there's a lot of work involved in making it behave smoothly and completely on a system, I'm not afraid of that. I'm an I/T worker (this supports my gaming habit). But I don't use it because I need to play games, lots of games, and I don't want to pay for Cedega on the off chance that the games I want to play will be compatible with it. This leaves me with dual booting as the only viable option. That would mean an awful lot of restarts because I have a short attention span. And why restart when Windows happens to run all the apps I want as well as the games?
It's even worse when you consider that there's no guarantee, as the topic informs us, that any binary you get has no guarantee of working right away like it does in Windows. I won't recommend Linux to anybody I know until I am 100% certain they will never need to compile anything, they will never need to know what a dependency is, and they will never need to use a text editor.
Bye karma.
Who cares? All the copyright cartel needs to do is donate a bunch of CD's to the ISPs, then they can just go in and take whatever they want! I heard Sony is recalling a whole bunch of them (possibly just for this purpose?)
Running things with restricted privelege isn't so hard (actually I just moved into the DBA group here and they do it all the time). You just need to do all the obvious things like make sure the service account has all the particular rights it needs. Delegation is actually quite good under Windows, very granular, so if you're willing to put in the effort it can be done. Especially with MS products, they tend to be quite good, although the MSN example is an unusual one. I certainly wouldn't be recommending MSN messenger to anybody though, probably even less than I would recommend MSIE to anyone (which I wouldn't).
Something else nobody has mentioned here is that Microsoft isn't buying all of these components, at least in the long run. They've licensed the technology for a lot of the parts (unlike the XBox where they practically bought everything off the rack). They can pretty much (license allowing) get anyone they like to make the parts at the cheapest prices, and they're free to shop around.
Initial runs for things like silicon and so on have really poor yields, this drives costs up quite a lot, but you could probably expect a pretty big drop in cost of production as economies of scale ramp up. Eventually MS will probably be breaking even on the hardware, or, more likely, they'll keep loss leading and drop the price through the floor. In a years time, which will you buy, a $200 Xbox 360 or a $600+ PS3 (with added r00tkit goodness)?
Unix style application isolation is being implemented properly in Vista. Of course, this vulnerability won't affect anyone running IE from a non-priveleged user account anyway, which is the case in many corporate environments, and is a recommended best practice from Microsoft (even if it is not the default under the current versions of Windows on the market).
On the home front many end users who are not tech-savvy enough to run Linux and not wealthy enough to pay Mac-tax will be running Windows as administrators for usability purposes.